Re: Fedora release lifecyle

From: Rahul Sundaram <sundaram fedoraproject org>

To: fedora-advisory-board redhat com

Subject: Re: Fedora release lifecyle

Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2006 16:37:54 +0530

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

The question that needs to be answered is who is the customer and what
are they going to pay for this? Payment does not need to be cash, but
it would help. The reason is that someone is going to have to pay for
the engineering, qa, documentation, bandwidth, etc.
The past has shown that Legacy gets volunteers who are interested in
certain packages and/or releases. Once that release is up, they are no
longer interested as they have usually transitioned their stuff to
Centos, Ubuntu, etc.
There are people who want longer release times, but I have not seen
that want translated into either cash or volunteer time. My opinion is
that while I would like to see 18 months of support, I am already
getting 4 free boons from Red Hat: 1) regularly compiled and tested
bits called Fedora X (versus just rawhide), 2) 11-13 months of
security updates and some enhancement updates, 3) source code for
their RHEL which people can get compiled bits from
Centos/Whitebox/EatAtJoesLinux, and 4) source code for security
updates for RHEL for 7 years (where you can get the compiled bits from
EatAtJoes Enterprise Linux).
For anything more than that.. I need to supply something to the bargain.

3) and 4) while beneficial is irrelevant if you would consider Fedora as
a independent distribution. I am not bargaining. I consider 18 months as
a good balance and I am putting up a RFE on that. That's generally
considered a contribution by itself.

If you would consider the current effort as a merge between core,extras
and legacy, we need to look at letting open the possibility of a longer
lifecycle since the lower barrier to entry aided by the focus on a
single infrastructure might help us get more volunteers involved now.